I am one of those few people who has never seen the movie ‘The Wizard of Oz’. However, I believe the cowardly lion discovers courage and no doubt lives forever differently.
TV I do watch, and an endless stream of 60 minute dramas that aid R&R of an evening - or a leisurely saturday morning with a suitable ‘big’ breakfast. All part of the Friary rhythm! This morning I caught an episode of ‘Law & Order’ dealing with rape. The story revolved on two points; one the difficulty in proving rape from the victim’s perspective. The other the way in which truth has continually to be wrestled into the open as the deceits behind which it seeks to hide are exposed for the distractions and lies that they are.
The Lie
One breaking news story of this weekend is the possible deceits of Chris Huhne MP and his former wife Ms Pryce over charges that they colluded to pervert the course of justice - a serious crime in Common Law that carries the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
The allegations date back to 2003 and only in 2012 have sufficient distortions, deceits and lies been exposed to enable the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to determine that there are sufficient grounds to bring criminal charges.
The Garden
These thoughts carry be back to the garden where a man and a women sought to disguise their nakedness and indeed their presence from Divine authority.
When both disguise and concealment failed to protect them, the man began the blame game and pointed to everyone else but himself as the reason for the act of wrong doing - off limits scrumping to be precise.
Now I do not know what a short, simple statement of honesty when caught might have produced. However, we do observe an attempt to create a tangled web of deceit. This quickly led to lifelong exclusion from the garden - a life sentence if ever there was one. Bad news since, as Joni Mitchell reminded us in idealistic innocence, ‘We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’. Best of luck with that!
The Consequence
So excluded for a life time - and life time was generations of waiting until a Truth teller arrived in town and a steep and narrow pathway was created back towards the garden. Problem being the price of traveling on this pathway created through blood, sweat and tears, was a commitment to follow the Truth teller in simply telling the truth.
I, like many, find this hard. My childhood and teenage years exposed me both to being lied to and then to developing an acute sense of exercising an economy of language when expressing A truth as if it were THE truth.
Difficulties emerged when I began to walk on this crafted Truth teller’s way, initially often slipping off and having to painfully recover the path. Realising that society at large was more familiar with the economy truth game than the real truth game. This latter seen as both a fool’s errand and damaging in that it created a moral dilemma for the one hearing my Truth - a dilemma they preferred not to engage with. So I then became their problem since I created the moral dilemma!
The Conclusion
Well I have now become very familiar with the way of Truth and like it. Often I find I will be walking alone, and the climb is steep and challenging. The path however has stunning vistas and I can observe those moments where truth economy might well have secured me an apparently more comfortable path, if not a place to lay my head in comfort for a while. Yet the Truth teller does not seem that committed to resting and so neither am I.
Can’t help wondering what truth telling might actually do to rebuilding faith and trust in each other and so stimulate both national morality, economic growth and international reputation.
